Sharing the Madness or "How to Eat an Elephant, Part 1"
I decided to post the following exchange between an invaluable member of my dissertation committee, Zachary. I've made reference to my committee before and they know I often publicize my process. In fact, my chair, "The Chair" will often say to me, "Okay now I guess you're going to go blog about it..." when I have drawn a conclusion about something. I have not, yet, written about Christopher but his time is coming. I try to spare him as much as possible from my mess until it has taken more of a shape. I warned him about my "how" though, and he still signed on. In any case. I fully intend to document my process both for sanity, the sake of sharing, and reference. I openly welcome feedback, dialogue, and sharing with anyone who might have thoughts...that being said, here goes part I of "How to eat an elephant"As a small aside, I named my dissertation process How to Eat an Elephant because of that old joke, 'how to do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time'. The idea actually came from Christopher when he said to me to stop thinking about the whole dissertation and just think about writing one day at a time. Sage wisdom. Okay and now...
Zachary,
To preface, I have not thought any of this through, as a result I already made the mental boundary to send this to your personal email versus your professional one as I am very much asking for much more than I am likely offering in terms of creative thought.
I am in the process of creating a literature review, and have found myself down many rabbit holes; some good and some not so good. I must say, the business/organizational literature and reading is much more exciting than the education literature and that in and of itself is cause for questioning. However, I've stumbled upon the book Tribal Leadership and I love it if only because I feel so validated in the way I look at organizations and systems. On the front cover it says, "Leveraging natural groups to build a thriving organization" and that is the crux of so much for me in terms of leadership. George and I had a conversation about leadership for what? Does leadership always have to be about change? We both agreed that it does not and that leadership can sometimes be for stasis, much like a human organism, or a biological system which does not need excess or continuously dies and births, and cyclically owning each as part of the process. So yes, we change but we also work very hard for stability and elements of predictability. It is a delicate balance.
The piece that struck me most keenly was this:
Tribes emerge from the languages people use to describe themselves, their jobs, and others. For most people, language is something they just live with and don't think about. Tribal Leaders know how to nudge language in a way that makes it morph...Change the language in the tribe, and you have changed the tribe itself. Hold that piece and then sift in the following:
(President of Griffin Hospital in Connecticut, Peter Charmel says the following when asked about the success of the hospital) Looking back, it's clear that we never could have accomplished this without engaging our employees and getting them involved in the process. I think that's what distinguishes the approach.
This idea that somehow a leader is both responsible and in deference to the power of the group is fascinating and is at the center of my research and where it has lead me is to the work of Vygotsky around thought and language. His ideas that consciousness preceded language make sense and we can grasp that, but add to it the idea that a leader fits in between that. A transformational leader or a tribal leader...a leader both in front of and embedded in a group...that somehow a leader is able to articulate the consciousness of a system and then the leader is both|and at the same time the symbol and the meaning. Is that not what grabs us and holds us??? When someone can bring life, not just life but detailed, articulate, emotive, affective life to our lived experience? We rally behind that because it validates us, and it makes us feel as though we are seen and heard and we matter. Ironically, or really no...not so, but this correlates to your thought from this summer about connection across space and time. The cloud atlas effect. I can think of examples of when leaders have preceded consciousness, perhaps in the universal design, intentionally, like Galileo. Where sometimes the leader becomes a martyr for consciousness, dying in the system like a cancer. Yet, if what Senge says about the indivisible whole is true, then you cannot ever kill a thought, or a leader with a thought because you cannot unthink it and if it exists in one part of a system then it exists in the entirety of the system. Typically what we look for are those to affirm the perceptions we believe (Kegan Imperial, Erikson Industry v. Inferiority) but this is only sufficient for a time...we are called to be stable and growing simultaneously.
Now, in this book it is also stated that, if a groups leverage points are applied incorrectly then it results in tribal mediocrity...I reframed that as status quo; and if I am still to use Scharmer's U as the backbone this would move to support the left side of the U in that maladaptive or ineffective leveraging connect to voices of fear, judgment, and cynicism. This would keep us stable, this would keep us healthy enough, but as we work to balance change and stasis, too much deference to one severely cripples the other. I have not gotten so far into the book to see how it lays with the rest of the theory, but I needed to write to think straight.
In my pilot study there was so much with the groups...group affiliation dictated behavior, rules of engagement or disengagement, connection, and authorship. Which, theoretically speaking makes sense...but my question is about creating connection, how do we do it? And I just feel really close to something right now with this work.
Sincerely,
Jessica Williams
**I thought I should ask prior to posting Zachary's response, await with bated breath and until then, if you have thoughts, comment!!